DNC in Denver 2028?

A DNC exploratory committee visited Denver last week to see if it's the best place for the 2028 Democratic National Convention. Other possible 2028 locations include Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. 

I covered the 2008 Dem convention in Denver as an embedded blogger with the Wyoming delegation. Why not return to those glory days, when Barack Obama was the nominee and all set to move into the presidency (twice) while the GOP plotted to never let anything like that ever happen again. And look what they did. Just take a look around and see what they did to guarantee themselves a Democrat-free future, a democracy-free future. Use search bar to find my DNC Denver 2008 posts.

This was then...

Denver August 2008

Wrong shipping date confuses book buyers and me too

I was flummoxed (yes, flummoxed) to see my historical novel "Zeppelins Over Denver" listed for pre-order on Amazon.com with a shipping date of Nov. 19. On the product page, a May 5, 2026, pub date is listed and that is correct. At the same time, I was holding a copy of "Zeppelins" in my hands, wondering why an entity such as Amazon, which can speed a supply of Dude Wipes to me overnight, wants readers to wait until almost Thanksgiving for my first novel. I have alerted the site's problem-solvers and hope for a quick solution. I mean, the book is worth waiting for, might even make a great holiday gift, but I may be an old man before that comes around. Pause for fact check: I am an old man now, typing this with the same four fingers I used on typewriters and keyboards since the 1970s when I was putting my first words to paper. Yes, paper. So, if you are anxious to read a novel set in 1919 featuring characters out of The Great War in Europe, leave a comment and I will sell you a copy and mail it the old-fashioned way. 

Travel now with Patrick as he contemplates a new life in the West

The opening paragraphs of my new novel, Zeppelins Over Denver:

Patrick Michael Hott pulled his cap down on his forehead and slumped into the seat on the east side of the southbound train. It was the last day of July 1919. He shifted in the seat, trying to bend his lanky frame into the limited space. He looked out the window. Cows grazed on brown swatches of grass that stretched all the way to the flat horizon. He passed green wavy ranks of ripening corn. There was a man laboring out in his field. An old farmhouse. More cows.

He looked in the other direction, past his seatmate and to the opposite side of the train. That was the west and the Rocky Mountains. Heads and hats blocked that view out of the passenger car windows. So many big people. So many hats. Floppy women’s hats adorned with feathers. Towering cowboy hats worn by towering cowboys. Straw boaters worn by rangy young dudes. Beat-up hats worn to protect farmers from the mile-high sun. Every blessed American wore a big hat that obscured his view of the mountains. They were all on his train.

Why couldn’t they wear sensible headwear such as the soft cap he bought in Chicago on the Fourth of July? He had joined his brother’s family to picnic on Lake Michigan for the first Fourth that America celebrated after The Great War. Not even a month ago. He bought the cap from a street vendor. He liked it immediately and spent too much of his hard-earned pay for it. He liked that he could pull it down over his big ears when the winter winds blew off the lake. The bill kept the sun off his face, which would come in handy now that he was on his way to Arizona. It also gave him a dapper air, or so he believed.

To be continued

Order Zeppelins Over Denver by Michael T. Shay now from your favorite bookstore. Just yesterday, friends ordered copies from Parnassus Books in Nashville, co-owned by the magnificent Ann Patchett,  and Mitchell Kaplan's Books & Books in Miami. Mitchell was co-founder of the amazing Miami Book Fair that began in 1984. These bookstores are key parts of the literary world that keep hope alive even when dark forces try to destroy us. 

May 4, 1970, Four Dead in Ohio, thousands in Vietnam and Cambodia, it never stops

Kent State Massacre, May 4, 1970; me (in uniform w/DEWAT rifle) marching at U of SC Navy ROTC drill, May 7, 1970; me (in civies) marching against the war on streets of D.C., May 9, 1970. Four dead in Ohio, two shot dead at Jackson State U, May 15; thousands in Vietnam, more in Cambodia, dozens of school children blown up by U.S. in Iran. It never ends.

Riding along on Peter Richardson's Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine

I read the new book by Peter Richardson, "Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine." It's published by the University of California Press. Early reviews say the book does a credible job tracing the influence of Rolling Stone with its "new journalism" or, as Hunter S. Thompson fans and critics called it, "gonzo journalism." Thompson influenced many of us but in different ways. He was criticized for his unorthodox style of reporting the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign. The establishment press had its way of covering campaigns and Thompson had his own glorious approach.

Others viewed it differently. Said novelist Nelson Algren in a 1979 review of "The Great Shark Hunt" in the Chicago Tribune: "Now that the dust of the '60s has settled, his [Thompson's] hallucinated vision strikes one as having been. after all, the sanest." 

The book's original 1973 cover has
a secret to reveal.

Thompson and Algren are both long gone. Both of these rowdy writers documented brutal eras: Thompson the 1960s and '70s; Algren the Great Depression through the 1970s. We may never see their like again. We need them now. Wouldn't it be thrilling to see Dr. Gonzo clash with Trump's oily apparatchiks?

Thompson's writing in RS influenced my writing but not my lifestyle. Both would have considered me a square. That said, I read everything Hunter S. Thompson wrote. I read every feature in Rolling Stone of the '70s and it shaped my attitude and my writing.  Once I unlocked the secret of reading at five, I absorbed everything: cereal boxes, billboards, all the books the librarians let me check out. The three important books in my life: "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller,  "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey, and "Slaughterhouse-Five," by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I was so wild about "Catch-22" that I forced it upon my Catholic high school friends and we were as impressed it as they were surfing and girls. It was funny. It had something to tell us. Heller was a messenger and, in 1968, we really had to listen. One of the book's suggested titles was "Snowden's Secret." Heller teases the secret throughout the book; its revelation toward the end is almost too much for Yossarian to bear. 

Every book I read told a secret. I loved the act of reading but was blissfully unaware that I also was unlocking life's secrets. 

Richardson spills plenty of Rolling Stone's secrets along the way. The magazine's biggest secret is that is existed at all. It spilled the secrets of my generation, the good (music coverage), the bad (Manson), the ugly (Altamont). It was fun. It was cool to be in the circle of readers. It shaped me into a different person than the one expected by me as a young man and those around me. 

The last five years of the 1970s were, according to the author, the magazine's golden era. The '70s were a golden era for many of us Boomers, locked into our 20s and early 30s. The mag helped us through those years, helped us get a handle on being young in America. Mischief was afoot. Cults were big. Rock grew into a giant industry. Right-wingers plotted their takeover of America which fizzled with Nixon but they wouldn't let that happen under Reagan and the cons who followed. Jann Wenner moved the Stone to New York where da big money was an it gradually grew into something much larger but also smaller. I read it only occasionally now. I like the political coverage and introduction to new music styles and new bands. 

The thing I love about Rolling Stone is that it taught me to write. It was a writer's workshop if you were paying attention. Hunter Thompson and Joe Eszterhas. I also was learning how to write like a traditional journalist while learning about "new journalism." I was too much of a straight arrow to be gonzo but the techniques are in me and enter into my fiction. Woodward and Bernstein caused a rise in J-School students while Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, Joni Mitchell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harry Crews, and Toni Morrison taught us to by-God write like we meant every damn word. This is a short list of my writing heroes/heroines, one befitting a blogger who keeps on truckin'.

Richardson's book was published by University of California Press. It is a university press, a key player in the publishing universe. As you might expect, documentation is required. Richardson provides it in spades. A "Random Notes" section brings readers up to date on the key players. That is followed by Acknowledgements, Notes (lots and lots of notes), and Index. Use the book as a handy guide to a decade, 1967-76, that could be called "the shadow 60s" for its many USA-rockin' events. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" now available to pre-order

On April 24, I guesstimated that "Zeppelins Over Denver" would be out by summer. You have to be careful with these things as publishing tends to take time and you don't want to get readers' hopes up unnecessarily. 

"Zeppelins" is now on pre-order (May 5 official pub date) at your favorite bookstore or even from your least favorite big-box outlet that places book bins somewhere among twelve-packs of underwear and rows of gleaming BBQ grills. 

My goal is to get the book into local stores and those in my old stomping grounds of Wyoming and Colorado. It's a bit tricky because the book is set in Colorado, specifically Denver, in 1919. I'm now officially a Florida resident, a return to my roots and the comfort of family. My Colorado roots go back to 1919 when all of my grandparents decided Denver was the place to be. 

My grandmother Florence decided to extend her tenure as an army nurse in France to the new army hospital in someplace called Aurora. There she met and married my grandfather Raymond, a cavalry officer from Iowa who left the war with lung problems so they shipped him to the hospital that eventually became Fitzsimons Army Hospital. Cavalry officer met nurse and there you go. 

My Irish immigrant grandfather Martin left sweltering Chicago after having a lung surgically removed due to empyema. The surgeon urged him to recuperate in a drier clime, Arizona, for instance, or maybe Denver. He chose Denver. Grandmother Agnes, the first postmistress of a tiny town near Cincinnati, jumped into a Model T with her sister and two gal-pals and drove the rugged road to Colorado. She and her sister decided to stay while the others returned to the banks of the Ohio. Martin and Agnes met at the Hibernian Club and one thing led to another and here I am.

That's just background. The setting is important to me as I was born in Denver, did some of my growing up there, returned after college to work, left Denver to go to grad school up I-25 at CSU, and then moved north to Cheyenne to work for the Wyoming Arts Council for 25 years. Retirement party with great homemade pie on a Friday in January 2016. On Monday morning, I sat and started writing this book.

Co-worker at retirement party: Hey Mike, whatcha gonna do after retirement? You can't just sit around, you know. 

Me: I'm gonna sit around and write a novel. A historical novel.

Co-worker: That's nice. Give me another slice of that pie.

Ten years later, I'm in Florida and I have a book. Easy as pie.

Stay tuned here for more updates. 

"Zeppelins Over Denver" due out by summer

Just finished reviewing the galley proofs of my first novel. My first published novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was in my 20s. I actually started earlier, as a kid writing letters that were rarely answered. My first readers were disinterested friends and family members. Maybe that’s where I learned how to hold an audience. Most of my early writing had an audience of one. I discovered journaling and keep up that written practice with this blog. I registered with the original Blogger from Pyra Press in 2001 and posted my first weblog in November 2005. I began blogging regularly in January 2006.

But back to the novel. The title is “Zeppelins Over Denver” and it will be out in May from The Ridgeway Press of Michigan in Detroit. Publisher and friend M.L. Liebler helped me get the ball rolling and I am forever grateful. Small presses rule! Big presses are great too but they have spent a lot of time ignoring me. C’est la vie! I was learning how to write all of this time, from the early 1970s until now. I’m still learning. Always will be.

“Zeppelins” is a historical novel set in 1919 Denver. Its origins lie on the yellowing pages of my paternal grandmother’s diary from her time as a U.S. Army nurse in France, 1918-19. She kept one diary in her lifetime and it was lost for decades, existing only as a rumor that faded with each passing year. It was rediscovered in my sister Molly’s basement in Tallahassee. She’s a nurse like our mother and my father’s mother. Eileen, another sister who also was a nurse, took the diary and transcribed it. She asked me for editorial assistance. As writer and editor, I gladly provided it. I whipped it into shape, working more as a conservator than a fiction writer. I corrected spelling and punctuation. I changed no contents, censored nothing. It was lovely just the way it was.

Eileen asked me to put together a little book for the family. Along the way, I researched the service of army nurses in the Great War and the Great War itself. I thought I knew at least some of the history. I had read war novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Good Soldier Schweik,” “Soldier of the Great War,” and “Winter Soldier.”  I had read “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman and Paul Fussell’s excellent “The Great War and Modern Memory.” I’ve read the poetry: Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. I have read some of the celebratory war poetry, too. Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees" was my father’s favorite poem. I wondered if Dad had contemplated the shattered trees in the Bulge battlefield in the Ardennes in 1944. Kilmer’s reputation lives on at Columbia University’s annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. The Columbia Daily Spectator once ranked the contest as number one among the “Best Columbia Arts Traditions.”

The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew. I dug deeper. In the end, I decided to absorb everything I knew and let it come out in what I see as a historical novel colored by the darkly humorous war novels of Joseph Heller, Juroslav Hasek, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And there you have it. Ten years of work poured into almost 400 pages. I hope you enjoy it. If you are inspired by the characters, some of them will return in the sequel, “Patrick of the Mountains.” The draft manuscript is complete and it will be published once the edits and revisions are complete. I have roughed out a plot for a third novel but we will see where that goes.